Posts tagged Samsung

The international Galaxy S II has already received the update to Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, leaving the sized-up Galaxy Note behind on Android 2.3. Today, several European users are reporting that their devices have received an OTA update notification that brings their phone-tablet hybrid into 2012 with the Android 4.0 update.

Of course, this is a Samsung device, and Samsung has revamped their Touchwiz UI overlay for the Note, which looks a lot more like its Gingerbread variant. Other features in the upgrade include a new and improved S Note application, a new S Memo widget, and the Premium Suite Shape Match and My Story applications. Of course, you’ll get the performance improvements that come with ICS as well.

Owners of the AT&T-branded Galaxy Note will have to wait for the update to pass through carrier testing, which tends to add 1-3 months to the process. Hopefully that process has already begun, and AT&T Note owners will be getting their own taste of Ice Cream Sandwich very soon. We’re leaning towards the update coming sooner than later, as an AT&T-branded Galaxy Note was spotted at CTIA this week.

Though Samsung lost its top perch, the Korean handset maker still managed to carve out a 21.7 percent share thanks to healthy demand for its Galaxy smartphone lineup.

Samsung’s market share has jumped from 4.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010 to almost 22 percent, forcing Apple to now fight to stay ahead.

Though Apple sold 4 million units of the latest iPhone within the first three days alone, the company managed to top its closest rival last quarter by also offering older iPhone models at low prices, says Juniper. Such a move is part of Apple’s strategy to combat the standard and premium smartphones sold by Samsung.

“The scale of Samsung’s product range is saturating the market,” Juniper analyst Daniel Ashdown said in a statement. “Apple has had to counter Samsung’s products like the Galaxy Ace in order to maintain the visibility of its brand.”

Other research reports have also pointed to a surge for Apple during the holiday quarter.

Strategy Analytics pegged Apple’s share of the smartphone market at 23.9 percent last quarter, narrowly outpacing Samsung at 23.5 percent. But for 2011 as a whole, Samsung captured the larger share of shipments.

Apple has also just begun to keep pace with the huge demand for its latest iPhone. A glance at the Apple Store’s sales page for the iPhone 4S now reveals it as being in stock, a change from early January when the wait time was still three to five days.

Looking at the rest of the industry, HTC was the only other manufacturer in the top five to see a jump in sales from a year ago, shipping an estimated 12.1 million smartphones last quarter. RIM’s BlackBerry shipments remained steady at 14.4 million, down less than a percentage point from last year.

And Nokia is anxiously awaiting renewed demand for its handsets courtesy of Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Nokia’s smartphone shipments fell 31 percent last quarter from a year ago, noted Juniper.

Overall, the industry shipped 149 million smartphones in the fourth quarter and 470 million for 2011 as a whole.

Here it comes the latest Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich ICS for Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 currently hitting in Middle East. This an update from last June version 4.0.3 N7000JPLPD. Its the same build and modem version that was also released in North Africa but varies only with default CSC file.

This is a full Arabiclanguage default firmware build for Galaxy Note users in Middle East. Its probably already being rolled out, the firmware is already loaded on Kies, so just check it out.

If you were disappointed when rumors broke out that the Samsung Galaxy S3 may skip Mobile World Congress 2012 and only launch sometime in April then here is some good news.

Samsung Galaxy S3 (GT-I9300) listed on Samsung UAE website

It looks like Samsung is certainly preparing to launch the Galaxy S3 as is evident but a device that is believed to be the third-generation Galaxy S model spotted on a Samsung support website (screenshot below).

The Galaxy S III is believed to be codenamed GT-I9300, a next logical code considering that the original Samsung Galaxy S was GT-I90XX and the Galaxy S II GT-I91XX (the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Galaxy note were I9250 and I9220 respectively).

If you’re thinking about picking up an unlocked GSM Samsung Galaxy Nexus, you now have a choice of pigments. UK retailer Clove Technology is accepting pre-orders for Google’s latest superphone, complete with 16GB of storage and smothered in a milky-white finish. Interested parties living across the pond can part with £498 ($770, VAT included) on February 6th to acquire this vanilla Ice-Cream-Sandwich-running machine. If you’re stateside, the retailer also offers shipping to the US — you can import yourself a bleached Nexus for around £431, or $666. So, will any of you Galaxy Nexus hold-outs be pushed over the purchasing precipice by this new hue?

Samsung and Google introduced the Galaxy Nexus smartphone and offered a preview of the Android 4.0 operating system, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, on Tuesday night (Pacific time) in Hong Kong.

The Galaxy Nexus — which will hit stores this November in Asia, Europe and the U.S. — will be the first device to run Ice Cream Sandwich, an operating system that will eventually make its way to tablets too.

The look and specs of the Galaxy Nexus, which had been rumored for months under the name Nexus Prime, are slick and mostly meet the standard of higher-end smartphones today.

The Galaxy Nexus carries over the curved glass screen look of the Samsung Nexus S smartphone that launched last December. The new phone looks slim too, coming in as thin as 8.49 millimeters, though some versions of the phone may be a bit thicker depending on the internal hardware used, Samsung said.

On the hardware side, the new Samsung smartphone will feature a 1.2-gigahertz dual-core processor, a massive 4.65-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, a built-in barometer, NFC technology for mobile payments, 1 gigabyte of RAM and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front for video chatting.

All of that is up to par with the top smartphones on the market — the Samsung Galaxy S II, the Droid Bionic and the iPhone 4S — but one lagging feature is the Galaxy Nexus’ 5-megapixel rear camera. The rear camera can shoot an impressive 1080p video at 30 frames per second, and there is an LED flash too, but top competitors nowadays are offering all that with 8-megapixel cameras, leaving the 5-megapixel choice as a bit odd.

Details on how much built-in storage memory the Galaxy Nexus will get or how much it will cost have not yet been released.

The Galaxy Nexus will feature no physical buttons on the screen of the device, a departure for Android. Every Android phone so far has come with four buttons across the bottom of the screen for search, home, back and menu.

Now, the buttons Android uses are part of Ice Cream Sandwich and appear and disappear as the operating system or an app need them. This is a similar tactic to that of Android Honeycomb, Google’s first tablet-specific operating system, which has been on the market since March.

Ice Cream Sandwich will use a new font called Roboto, which Google said will be easier to read and was designed specifically for clarity and beauty on smartphone and tablet displays. The Galaxy Nexus falls into Google’s Nexus program, which means the new phone will run a pure, unaltered version of Ice Cream Sandwich with no preinstalled apps from carriers and no user-interface changes from Samsung. The new version of Android features a rotating list of recent apps that allows for easy switching between apps and works similar to Honeycomb in this regard. The ability to take screenshots is finally part of Android. To take a screenshot, a user simply needs to hold down a phone or tablet’s power button and volume down buttons.

Google is promising an improved keyboard in Ice Cream Sandwich, as well as improved cut, copy and paste, improved talk to type and a new "face unlock" feature that uses facial recognition technology to secure a phone rather than traditional passwords.

Matias Duarte, who heads Android’s design and user interface, attempted to demo face unlock at the Hong Kong event (streamed on YouTube) on a Galaxy Nexus handset, but he couldn’t get the feature to work.

Another useful feature added to Ice Cream Sandwich is the software’s ability to save large amounts of recent emails for offline search. By default, offline search will save the last 30 days of a user’s email on a phone or tablet, but users can change that time period as they see fit.

Data usage controls are also being added in the new operating system, which enables users to choose if and when their phone alerts them that they’ve passed a certain amount of data consumed.

Users can even set their phone to stop using cellular data altogether once they’ve passed a certain limit. All of this will help them prevent over consuming data and racking up high phone bills. The influence of Apple’s iPhone and popular iOS apps such as Instagram and Hipstamatic can be seen in the addition of new built-in photo editing options for Ice Cream Sandwich, which were described by Google engineers in the presentation as adding "hipster" photo filters and adjusting angles in photos. Wireless sharing between two phones (for transferring contacts, links or even apps between phones within an arm’s reach) can occur using a feature called Android Beam, which looks like it works just like the Bump app available on Android and iOS and built by San Francisco start-up Bump Technologies.

Consumer electronics maker Samsung appears to have used a nearly three-year-old screen capture of the Maps application on the iPhone to promote its own Galaxy Player 50 portable media player.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball noted on Monday (via Jeremy Philippe) that Samsung appeared to be using a maps interface that was an "ever-so-slightly modified rip-off" of the Maps application on Apple’s iPhone for a promotional image of the Galaxy Player 50 on its website. However, it was quickly revealed that the interface shown on the device is actually an exact copy of an iPhone screenshot from a blog post by Laura Scott on BlogHer in 2008. AppleInsider originally posted Samsung’s pilfered iOS graphic last month in an article on GameStop’s Android gaming tablet plans and other attempts by Apple’s competitors to muscle into mobile devices beyond the smartphone, including the Galaxy Player’s attempt to rival iPod touch. Marketing staffers have frequently taken photographs portraying Apple’s Mac products and replaced the screen with a Windows screenshot, or as Nokia did this summer, simply use stock photography of a woman using the iPhone 4 and emblazon the shot with a Nokia banner to produce a generic ad. Samsung’s use of an old iOS Maps screenshot (evidently pulled from a Google image search) is particularly egregious because the graphic was purposely edited to incorporate an Android task bar in order to appear to be a feature of Google’s platform, and then used to market Galaxy Player as an alternative to Apple’s original iPod touch. The issue is further complicated by the fact that Apple is already accusing Samsung of "slavishly" copying the design of its iPhone and iPad its own products. Samsung’s line of Galaxy Player devices, announced last year, was widely viewed as the company’s response to Apple’s successful iPod touch, which blends the iPhone with Apple’s line of iPod music players.

The South Korean consumer electronics giant has recently faced several setbacks in its legal dispute with Apple. Late last week, a Netherlands judge denied the company’s request to block sales of the iPhone and the iPad in the country. In contrast, Apple in August successfully convinced a Dutch judge to order an injunction against three of Samsung’s smartphones. The Federal Court in Australia recently issued a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet after Apple assert several of its patents related to touchscreen and multitouch technologies. The ruling came on the heels of a similar decision in Germany that blocked the device. Samsung could also face injunctions on Apple’s home turf. Last week, a Samsung lawyer was unable to distinguish between the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the iPad at a distance of 10 feet during a court hearing. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh has yet to issue a ruling on the matter, but she has said that she believes the Galaxy tablets do infringe on some of Apple’s iPad-related patents. However, Apple must still show that those patents are valid in order to win its case against its rival. After Apple raised concerns with its rival last year, the matter went unresolved, prompting the iPhone maker to turn to the courts for help. The Cupertino, Calif., company first sued Samsung in April, and the disagreement quickly escalated, spanning more than 20 complaints across 10 countries. Apple continues to maintain that the resemblance of Samsung’s products to its own amounts to theft. "It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad … This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas," an Apple spokeswoman was reported as saying last week. In September, Samsung was accused of borrowing Apple’s Safari and App Store icons to decorate the wall of a mini-store in an Italian mall after photos of the store emerged, but it turned out that the wall was actually part of the larger store’s design.

Goodness, Samsung seems to be carpet bombing the smartphone and tablet right now – they will now have smartphones and tablets of all shapes and sizes. The Galaxy Tab 10.1 is already pretty great (read Albert’s review here), but there are always people who preferred the original Galaxy Tab’s 7 inch size – it is roughly the size of a notebook, whereas the 10 inch might be too big for some people’s tastes.

The biggest complaint of the original Galaxy Tab was that its operating system was not necessarily made for tablet implementation, something which bothered us as well. “Half-baked” was an apt term. Now that great size can be combined with the power of the Honeycomb tablet. Samsung also threw in a 1.4Ghz dual core processor, and a massive 5,100mAh battery, giving up to ten hours use. Running Android 3.2 it is also running the latest TouchWiz skin, which we are still on the fence about. Guess we have to try it out.

The device we are more excited about is the Galaxy Note phone, which will have a massive 5.3 inch AMOLED screen but more significantly a capacitative stylus. Obviously this will make it a very big phone to use, but if you have big hands it might be less of an issue, because it is still a very thin phone so it should be comfortable in your pocket. This is the closest someone has come to combining a tablet and smartphone in one device. That new screen packs a 1280 x 800 resolution – just to put that in perspective, that is still the resolution a Macbook Pro 13 inch screen ships with…

I highly recommend you check out the video:

If it is in any way close to as good as the Galaxy S2, Samsung might have a (slightly niche) winner on its hands.

Samsung announced on that it will hold an event Today August 3rd during which all Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners can bring in their tablets to have them updated to the latest software build. The update will add Samsung’s custom TouchWiz user interface, which includes live panels and mini apps, as well as a redesigned Samsung Hub application. It will also install Words with Friends, Amazon’s Cloud Player for music and Amazon’s Kindle software. Galaxy Tab 10.1 owners in the New York area can bring their units to the Samsung Experience Store at Columbus Circle between 1:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to have their devices updated for free. Those outside the New York metropolitan area will receive an over-the-air update “soon.”